If that is what you want from a PC, Ebay is probably your friend.

There appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding - on the part of Microsoft - just what a computer is for.
I have a Windows 7 PC which I fire up a few times a month to perform specific tasks. Those tasks are the reason I bought the OS in the first place. I did not buy Windows 7 just so I could install Windows patches. Yes I had automatic updates turned on until a few months ago (The tasks I perform on that machine tend to be towards the end of the month, so the worst turkeys are gone by then) but some security update caused a major update-reboot-fallback loop on my dual-boot machine when I needed it in a hurry so now I only apply patches when various sources indicate they have seen no problems with them.

From what I hear of Apple, they are not much better.

I thought there were a couple of days in January when drivers had to scrape ice off their windscreens, sounds like you live somewhere between Mannheim and Freiburg.

You have Flash?
The Mute button is going to get a lot of use when this feature makes it.

If I'm in a queue to pay in a supermarket, the ones that take the time are the ones who use their cards.
I also spend a lot of time in Germany and pretty much the only times I use a card is when it is to be charged to the company or when the amount exceeds a couple of hundred Euros.

1 - open a new account under worse conditions
2 - somewhere else, as in: with another bank.
I'd be tempted to close that account immediately but if the conditions are so much better . . . do it in a couple of years.

but the uk government really doesn't give a shit about anyone other than themselves
That is missing the point somewhat. Secret services want to watch over absolutely everything - because they can. Their governments seem to have largely abdicated control, not least because then the decisions on what to spy on and what to ignore could then be held against the politicians responsible. GCHQ seem to consider any inland NGO and most foreign countries to be targets but a lot of that is absence external of controls.

The E German Stasi *owned* the country, and had leading figures in all three W German agencies. A significant proportion of that country's budget was spent on the Stasi. Did it help them when Gorbachov decided not to stand in the way of reunification?

The U.S. are gathering more and more data, hell - they even knew about the 9.11 group ahead of time (and had been warned by the Germans) but did it help?

Look at Tunisia a couple of weeks ago, GCHQ were so busy spying on AI that they missed the big one. As if AI are going to mount an attack of that kind.

But are you in college?
My college time is a while ago now but I remember virtually all of the females marrying during those years, mostly other students but sometimes boyfriends from before they even started there. Those who did not were usually not interested for some reason or other. Most of those relationships were still holding up at the 25th year meetup we had.

The rest of us males were fishing outside that pool.

I had a case a bit like this recently.
I started getting mails from a cellphone company (the one I actually use myself) which had nothing to do with me. Then I started getting bills emailed. The bills had the cellphone number and a postal address, I looked it up and rang their land line. It turned out I knew the person involved - he has the same name as me and works for the same company so we sometimes get each others mails at work. He had made a mistake when he supplied an email address. It took a couple of months to fix it. I would get an email and forward it to his address, he would complain to the cellphone company, I would complain to the cellphone company. Eventually he sent me a mail saying they had managed to send a bill to him rather than me.

If a Tripadvisor app got installed that way, I would have thought that its requirements had been reduced to the rights it already had.

That could end up being the lesser evil, and would end up making a hell of a statement.
Of course the consequences with countries like China or Russia would have to be thunk through - they would be encouraged to pass similar laws so as to get Google out of their countries.

The balkanisation of the Internet.

So far.
They are probably watching this rather closely.

Alas, while the Chinese rulers are pragmatic enough to accept things they don't really like but can't control, the French rulers are idiots who believe nothing is beyond their power, because, after all, they're French....

The U.S. authorities have a history of this type of behaviour. Just think of the case Microsoft is currently fighting, the one where they do not want to give the U.S access to emails being held in the E.U. (Ireland), or the case where some NYC judge imposed a massive fine - and confiscation of assets - on the Iran for some terrorist attack they patently had nothing to do with.
The U.S. mostly try to be a "force for good", but accept no outside authority in the many cases where they failed - often maliciously.

For the record, I am not particularly happy with the "right to be forgotten".

Giving him a particularly tough sentence for something he was not even charged with should be enough to get the judge disbarred and the verdict automatically overturned. Won't happen though.